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Rick Prelinger

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker who has taught in the MFA Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts and lectured widely on U.S. cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access.

In 1983 he founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002; 2,100 of the films are also available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse on the Internet Archive.

With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library that is regularly open to the public, located in downtown San Francisco.